Digital transformation is not a buzzword. IT has moved from the back office to the front office in nearly every aspect of business operations, driven by what IDC calls the 3rd Platform of compute with mobile, social business, cloud, and big data analytics as the pillars. In this new environment, business leaders are facing the challenge of lifting their organization to new levels of competitive capability, that of digital transformation — leveraging digital technologies together with organizational, operational, and business model innovation to develop new growth strategies.
One such challenge is helping the business efficiently reap value from big data and avoid being taken out by a competitor or disruptor that figures out new opportunities from big data analytics before the business does. From an IT perspective, there is a fairly straightforward sequence of applications that businesses can adopt over time that will help put direction into this journey.